Tokyo Police Club: Elephant Shell
Monday, 05 May 2008 07:44
Tokyo Police Club: Elephant Shell
Memphis Industries, out now.
In a nutshell...
Sparse, speedy, scholarly and not as Strokesian as before
What's it all about?
Well, considering that the highly-literate Canadian quartet may well have swallowed a dictionary, thesaurus and the International Phonetic Alphabet while recording their first full album, Elephant Shell, your guess is a good as ours.
Tessellate's, the second single to be taken from the album, key line is "Dead lovers salivate/Broken hearts tessellate, tonight". Tessellate apparently means 'a pattern of polygons that covers a plane without gaps or overlaps.' Riiiiight.
They follow that up with "it's a ruse/it's a laugh/experts, they agree/listen to the math/Australopithecine" from Listen To The Math. Australopithecine? Any of several extinct humanlike bipedal primates with relatively small brains of the genus Australopithecus? Ah, Australopithecine!
So, in summary - Elephant Shell is an album about making mosaics out of human organs with the help of monkeys. Possibly.
Who's it by?
Tokyo Police Club began in the somewhat unusual circumstances of all four members having previously been in the same band, which disbanded because they thought they, well, sucked.
TPC was the phoenix which rose from the ashes of that charred, sucky mess, forming in Newmarket, Ontario in 2005, the band made up of guitarist Josh Hook, keyboardist Graham Wright, drummer Greg Alsop and fey-voiced singing bassist Dave Monks.
The Strokes-on-encyclopedia's-gone-new-wave sound of their 16 minute long debut EP A Lesson In Crime, released in 2006, had hipster bloggers around the globe straining at the leash like a horny hellhound, but since the release of the Smith EP over a year ago, all has been quiet on TPC front.
As an example...
"And all the boys who called their mothers on that day/We're no tough bunch but they had the nerve to go and say/That all your secrets have drowned." - Tessellate
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
Given that over the course of three albums the Strokes have made about as much as a dent on the US mainstream as F****d Up, it is hard to see Tokyo Police Club's slicker but more oblique and cerebral take on their sound doing any different.
What the others say
"Elephant Shell makes clear that the band's ambitions are as much literary as musical." – Jody Rosen, Rolling Stone
"If you can spare the time to get up close and personal (and let's face it, that's a lot less time than with most albums), 'Elephant Shell' proves itself truly sensational." – Jon Fletcher, New-Noise.net
So is it any good?
Well, one thing's for certain. By Tokyo Police Clubs disciplined standards, their debut album is a self-indulgent odyssey of epic proportions. While A Lesson In Crime's eight songs came in at just over 16 minutes, an average of two minutes and three seconds per tune, Elephant Shell's 11 songs add up to an alarming 28 minutes. Or around two minutes and 51 seconds each. Which is roughly the time it takes for the first chord of a Mars Volta track to end.
But in direct contrast to allowing themselves a little more time to play with in which to express themselves, TPC have, somehow, considering they were not exactly the Polyphonic Spree to start with, slightly stripped down their sound. They've smoothed off the serrated edges and trimmed any visible fat, until every track is as lean, slick and sparse as they can get it. Their methodology seems to be 'why gorge yourself on a riff, when you can have a wirey guitar line for verse and chorus, and a proper piano coda at the end of the song?'
While all this means that not a second of Elephant Shell is wasted, this rampant deconstruction has lead to a loss of the warmth, charm and wit that created such a buzz about TPC back in 2006. Your English Is Good (perhaps Our English Is Good would've been more apt given the lyrics) is all frantic guitars, handclaps and urgency, a shiny new take on TPC version 1.0, but the likes of In A Cave and Nursery Academy are so brutal in their efficiency and modern sheen as to make them unremarkable.
To paraphrase defunct Leeds post punks Black Wire, Elephant Shell is easy to admire, but hard to love.
5/10
Kelvin Goodson
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